


The Parasite

by eluna



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s04e18 The Monster at the End of This Book, Fix-It, Gen, Mental Instability, Minor Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, POV Chuck Shurley, Past Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Possession, Prophetic Dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-08-27 03:16:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16694404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluna/pseuds/eluna
Summary: So he has a dream about meeting the Winchesters—okay. Weird, and Vonnegut-arrogant, but okay. Chuck can accept that. But if he were to meet the Winchesters, face-blindness aside, Chuck has had enough dreams about Sam and Dean by now that he would instantly recognize them by sight, let alone by their personalities, their behavior, what they know about the contents of Chuck’s dreams. Why would he play dumb? he wonders as he mutters to himself, even while he writes out the events of the dream.Because I need you to play dumb. It gives me an opportunity to practice.To practice? Practice what? (Chuck’s fully aware that he’s starting to have a conversation with himself in his own head, and he tries to shake off the unnerved feeling this gives him. He fails.)It’s why I’ve been lurking in the background all this time. I needed to learn you—learn how you talk, how you act.





	The Parasite

**Author's Note:**

> It's never made sense to me how Chuck could have been God all along when, the first time we meet him, he's clearly having dreams about the Winchesters like he says he is. Why would God need to have dreams about the Winchesters of mysterious origins if he's God and he knows everything about everyone already? This is what I came up with to reconcile the Chuck from "The Monster at the End of This Book" with the Chuck-as-God that we know from later in the show.

It starts in the fall of ’05 with a headache—a bad one. Chuck gets headaches often, but this one feels different, more severe and more… _targeted_ ; he can feel its cadence when he presses on his temples and forehead. Aspirin does nothing for him, not even when he downs, in desperation, three times his usual dose.

 _Sleep_ , says a voice in his head, a voice that _sounds_ like his own yet feels wholly unfamiliar to him. But it sounds reasonable—Chuck would feel much better if he could only sleep off the pain—he listens to it and obeys it, tucking into bed at scarcely seven o’clock and drifting off turbulently.

Then comes the dream. Even though Chuck’s face-blindness usually gives him trouble visualizing the figures in his dreams, he has a clear picture of Sam Winchester, the college boy who goes to a Halloween party with his girlfriend and wakes up that night to find that his estranged brother, Dean, has broken into the apartment. The brothers argue about what sounds like a shared traumatic childhood growing up under a father who hunts monsters, of all things, for a living—a father who has now gone missing in the middle of a hunt. Reluctantly, Sam agrees to accompany Dean in search of their father, but only if he returns home in time for an interview with Stanford law.

Chuck wakes abruptly, in a cold sweat, at four in the morning, and finds that he can no longer remember the faces of the—characters, for lack of a better word—but the details of the dream remain fresh in his mind. Sitting up in bed, he shakes his head to clear it and swings his legs over the mattress, ready to brush off the dream and carry on with his day.

 _Write it down_ , says a voice in his head—the same sounds-like-him-not-like-him Voice that told him last night to go to sleep.

Chuck prepares to brush off that suggestion, too. He’s an accountant, he reasons, not a writer; he doesn’t know the first thing about writing.

 _So?_ says the Voice. _It was a good story, an interesting story. You should write it down._

That’s true, Chuck figures; he can’t remember the last time he had as vivid a dream as this, and besides, at four A.M., he’s got plenty of time to write before he needs to leave for work. Groaning, half-wondering why he’s even doing this, he climbs out of bed, sits down at his computer, and starts to recount everything he remembers.

He writes. And writes. The dreams keep coming, and the Voice keeps insisting that Chuck write it all down—even that he get a book deal with a low-end occult publisher. When Chuck was pounding out letters to prospective agents at his desk, it was almost like—like—

 _Like something compelled you to do it. Like_ I  _compelled you to do it._

Exactly. But that’s crazy, right? He must be losing his grip, Jesus.

 _Not quite Jesus,_ says the Voice with a chuckle that Chuck doesn’t understand.

Some things Chuck leaves out of the books for the sake of his characters’ reputations (and maybe his own). Like Sam drinking demon blood. And the obsessively romantically-charged thoughts the boys keep pretending not to have about each other. From what Chuck can glean, they had some kind of quasi-sexual relationship with each other when they were young—like high-school young—and now they’re both too ashamed of it to admit to each other that the feelings haven’t gone away with time or age. It grosses Chuck out at first, and then he gets used to it, just one more abnormality peppering the landscape of the Winchesters’ lives.

For a while, he also gets used to the Voice, even manages to convince himself that what he’s hearing is a normal part of his psyche. That all changes when things get meta. Really meta.

So he has a dream about meeting the Winchesters—okay. Weird, and Vonnegut-arrogant, but okay. Chuck can accept that. But if he _were_ to meet the Winchesters, face-blindness aside, Chuck has had enough dreams about Sam and Dean by now that he would instantly recognize them by sight, let alone by their personalities, their behavior, what they know about the contents of Chuck’s dreams. Why would he play dumb? he wonders as he mutters to himself, even while he writes out the events of the dream.

_Because I need you to play dumb. It gives me an opportunity to practice._

To practice? Practice what? (Chuck’s fully aware that he’s starting to have a conversation with himself in his own head, and he tries to shake off the unnerved feeling this gives him. He fails.)

_It’s why I’ve been lurking in the background all this time. I needed to learn you—learn how you talk, how you act._

Chuck frowns, his mind half on this disturbing progression of his thoughts and half on how the dream he had just didn’t make any sense. Like when he dreamed that he called himself a god for messing with the Winchesters’ lives. He never wrote anything into creation; he only ever copied down things he saw, visions given to him by someone or something  _bigger_. So why would he think he was—?

 _Just my little idea of a joke,_ the Voice says. _You_ do _know who I am by now, of course._

Chuck’s frown deepens. He never gave it much thought, to be honest. But if the Voice _isn’t_ a part of him—if it really _did_ compel him to find an agent and a publisher when he didn’t want either—but _was_ it the Voice doing those things to him?

_Heavens, you’re slow, but you’re getting warmer._

So then—the dreams came from the Voice, too?

_Warmer still. You’re catching up._

Okay, Chuck has _had_ it with the running commentary. If there’s some sort of parasite in his mind that’s starting to take control of what he says and does, the last thing he needs is that parasite supplying a stream of snark and insults.

 _Sorry_.

But before Chuck can even try to formulate a response, the doorbell rings. That must be the Winchesters. With a groan, Chuck surveys the pages he’s written about his dream that made no sense about this, then goes to answer the door.

Face-blindness aside, he recognizes them immediately. What he _tries_ to say is hello and that he has so many questions for them—about why his life seems to be tuned into theirs, about what’s happening to him and why—but his mouth feels like it’s glued shut. He tries to lift an arm: nothing. “You Chuck Shurley?” asks Dean.

Sam adds, “The Chuck Shurley who wrote the _Supernatural_ books?”

And finally, Chuck speaks, but his mouth moves of its own accord, and he doesn’t say any of what he actually means to say. “Maybe. Why?” comes out of him with a nervous, defensive quivering of his voice.

He wants to scream their names and beg for answers, but he doesn’t: he can’t. All the way out to their car and then into the house, Chuck’s body feels like it belongs to somebody else— _to the Voice_ , which has fallen silent in Chuck’s mind as it carries his body through the motions of Chuck’s latest dream, right down to the dialogue where he apologizes for being a capricious god and putting the boys through hell. It’s only after sending them away with pages of his latest, incomplete manuscript that Chuck feels a tensing in his muscles and realizes with a jolt that he can _move_ again. He gasps, literally jumping into the air, but when he tries to run out into the street after the Winchesters, his body freezes up again.

 _That’s not how this is going to work_ , comes the Voice, low and mocking. _You don’t do anything to interfere, and you get to keep control._

But for how long, Chuck wonders? For once, the Voice doesn’t answer.

He has another dream that night about Sam sleeping with Lilith and about himself being declared a prophet of the Lord. It’s another mystery that doesn’t make sense, and the Voice confirms,  _I had a little conversation with Joshua to plant the seed among angels. You’ll keep quiet for me, of course._

Now that Chuck has met Sam and Dean, he’s spending more and more of his time following orders from the Voice. What he says, what he does, and even what he thinks all seem to be increasingly under the control of the Voice, either directly or indirectly. The next time he sees the boys, he shares the Lilith dream but not the angel one, and when Castiel shows up calling Chuck a prophet, he plays along and gets to keep control.

And then he hears a voice in his head. Not _the_ Voice, but a different one—Dean’s. _Well, I feel stupid doing this, but I am fresh out of options. So please. I need some help. I’m praying, okay? Come on. Please._

The Voice responds, muttering, _Sorry. Thought I turned all those off_ , and Dean’s voice cuts out. It’s the first time Chuck really realizes that he’s in over his head, way above his pay grade, with this one.

Dean goes off script, showing up minutes later demanding that Chuck come with him to the Red Motel. Chuck is terrified; Dean may say that Chuck has the protection of an archangel, but Chuck knows he isn’t really a prophet and so _knows better_ than to believe him. _Relax_ , the Voice says. _I’m_ God _. I think I can handle faking this one._

Chuck is so distracted that he forgets to feel nervous. The Voice is God? _God?_

_The one and only._

But _how_ , Chuck wonders? Assuming that the Voice is being honest, why would he waste his time on Chuck, of all people?

_I’m in Witness Protection. This is all preparation for me to become Chuck Shurley._

Become—?

Just then, the Voice seizes total command of their body, leaving Chuck screaming silently within the confines of his own mind. They somehow make it through meeting Lilith intact, but after the Winchesters depart, the Voice does not relinquish its hold on Chuck.  _I’ll be taking what’s mine now. One more dream for old times’ sake?_ says the Voice, and Chuck shouts himself sloppy where no one will ever hear him.


End file.
